Austria Turns Off

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Austria Turns Off

Sometimes silence is the most effective form of protest. The latest round of the German government's war against the Internet has crept across national borders, provoking an unprecedented response from neighboring ISPs: total shutdown. The two-hour strike this spring, during which 98 percent of Austria went dark, was set off by a national police raid on a small Austrian ISP called ViP. The cops, looking for child pornography, confiscated ViP's computers - based on charges filed in Munich against a ViP user. Nothing was found.

This action is only the latest attempt to impose German law on the global Internet. Even though Deutschland knows it can't police the entire Net, the country is banding together with sympathetic European governments to strong-arm users into complying with Germany's laws. This has many ISPs living in fear.But netizens are fighting back. Earlier this year, German state prosecutors trying to close a Dutch ISP hosting a militant left-wing magazine were forced to back down in the face of an uproar from the international Net community.